Choosing answerers by observing gaze responses for museum guide robots

This paper presents a method of selecting the answerer from audiences for a museum guide robot. We performed the preliminary experiments that a robot distributed its gaze towards visitors to select an answerer and analyzed visitors´ responses. From these experiments, we have found that the visitors who are asked questions by the robot feel embarrassed when they have no prior knowledge about the question and the visitor´s gaze during the question plays an important role to avoid being asked question. Based on these findings we developed functions for a guide robot to select the answerer by observing behaviors of multiple visitors. Multiple visitors´ head motions are tracked and recognized by using an omni-directional camera and a laser range sensor. The robot detects the visitors´ positive and negative responses by observing their head motions while asking questions. We confirmed the effectiveness of our method by experiments.